This is a brief addendum to the last post, rather than an article in its own right. But I wanted to post it separately for search ranking reasons. It goes without saying that the British National Party (BNP) understand that being publicly labelled as “racist” loses them more votes than it gains. As a result, they do much to avoid the word. They claim they’re simply an “organisation concerned with one community or race”. As such, they insist, the BNP is just like other such organisations (such as the Black Police Officer’s Association, or the Action Group for Irish Youth).

I hope it’s not too extreme to point out that our granddads’ response to their generation’s Nazis was to bomb them and strafe them from the air; to shoot them with machine guns and rifles; torch them with flamethrowers, incendiaries and white phosphorus; to crush them with tanks, blow them up with grenades and high explosives and so on, and then march their supporters off to prison. I don’t know how people could’ve missed this, since we have well-publicised memorials at which we salute their courage for kicking Nazi arse so righteously, every single year.

Not that I think this would be a reasonable response to the BNP, of course, but it sure puts all this Oooo, we must understand the motivations of poor, misguided racists who consciously vote for Nazi organisations in perspective.

It’s particularly amusing when you consider that lots of the right wing commenters here spend much of their time grousing about a lack of chimpanzoid chest-thumping and ostentatious moral outrage in modern liberalism – yet suddenly, when we’re talking about an openly racist and fascist organisation, we have to understand.

2 responses to "British National Party: Is the BNP racist?"

Regarding FlyingRodent’s point about Britain’s WWII response to fascism, I’ve found myself wondering recently about, on the one hand, fighting fascism per se, and on the other, fighting foreign fascism. I don’t know my WWII history and culture well enough to properly comment, but I wonder if these two hands worked very closely together in WWII, which blinds us to the distinction between them, and maybe sometimes lets us see the latter as the former. A can of worms there if ever there was one, but I thought I’d mention it.

Hey Gyrus. I like FlyingRodent’s comment, but I’m not suggesting we bomb Burnley or anything. There clearly is a distinction to be made between foreign fascism and the domestic variety. Beyond that, it’s also worth pointing out that bombing Germany in the late 1920s when the fascists were still just a small group of agitators would have been both unjust and counterproductive.

To be honest, I’ve spent quite a while since the European elections trying to understand the specific reasons why there was such a leap to the right throughout most of the continent. And part of that entails trying to understand the BNP vote.

I’m extremely ambivalent on this issue. If this election had happened next month, perhaps I might be writing blog posts about group psychodynamics and referencing a lot of Reich. As it is, they caught me in a “but racism is just bad biology, and as such must be challenged vigorously” kind of mood.

The “bad biology” thing, incidentally, I mean in the Batesonian sense. It’s the latest phrase I’ve lifted from Gregory. He uses it in a talk he gave in 1971. It’s labelled “a lecture on Consciousness and Psychopathology” though his rambling, conversational style definitely puts it under the category “talk” rather than “lecture”. About halfway through, he muses…

There are things… that people do, that just give one the shivers. They will put the potted plants on the radiator… and this is just bad biology. And I guess “bad biology” is, in the end, bad Buddhism… bad Zen… and an assault on the Sacred. And that, really, is what we’re trying to do; defend the Sacred from being put on the radiator.

I really do think that racism — especially though not exclusively — organised racism is an example of this bad biology. But as tempting as the idea might be, I feel it’s clearly not as simple as “bricks and baseball bats”. If hundreds of thousands of people are voting for thinly-disguised fascists then society has a problem. I don’t think the solution is necessarily about “addressing their concerns” because many of their concerns are either imaginary (immigrants are a drain on our resources) or unworthy of being addressed (there’s too many blacks round here).

That said, insomuch as the average fascist voter has concerns that are genuine and within reason, then it’s possible that addressing those concerns would make them feel less alienated and — by giving them a greater sense of having a stake in society — make them less likely to need a scapegoat (removing one of the primary reasons people drift towards extremism).

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